


Jess Woke Up

by Yoshigali



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, No Dialogue, Sole Survivor Jess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 13:27:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11647503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yoshigali/pseuds/Yoshigali
Summary: Jessica was the only person to survive the night on the mountain, and now she has to live.





	Jess Woke Up

Jess woke up.  
She was someplace she didn’t recognize. It was dark, and she could hear water dripping onto nearby rocks. She was lying on some sort of grate, the metal cold on her skin. For the life of her, Jess could not remember how she got here. She remembered being dragged out of the cabin, falling, hearing Mike’s voice shouting for her, and then she was...here. Wherever here was.  
It hurt to even sit up. Without looking, she could feel all the cuts and bruises and blood, her blood, that covered her. It took her great effort to stand, and once she was on her feet, she had to hold herself up with a wooden beam or risk falling down again.  
The room was dark, and the rocks cut into her bare feet. She had one arm wrapped around her middle, desperate to keep herself together, and the other arm hung limply from her side. It was cold, so cold, but Jess didn’t have the energy to shiver. A few feet ahead she could see something like a jacket poking out of the dusty darkness. If she could just make it to the jacket, maybe she could figure out where she was, or how to get back to the others. At the very least, she would be warmer.

Jess woke up.  
She was in the waiting room of some sort of station. She couldn’t remember what authorities it belonged to, who exactly she was supposed to be talking to. She had fallen asleep in the chair, her knees pulled up to her chest and wrapped in a blanket someone at the station had given her. She was still in so much pain, covered in cuts and bruises and flakes of dried blood. There hadn’t been time to take care of her yet, to take her to the hospital, the men in the uniforms had said, because there had been an explosion at the lodge and they needed to know whether to send up more search and rescue teams. But Jess couldn’t remember anything to help them. She couldn’t even remember if she had ever known anything to remember.  
There was a hand on her shoulder, belonging to a man holding a tray of coffee. He must have woken her up, as softly as he could. Jess wished he hadn’t. She was exhausted, and the scant minutes of sleep she had gotten here and there over the past few hours had been fitful at best. The man, after confirming she was awake, offered her one of the coffees on his tray. She shook her head, turning it down. She attempted to be polite, but she didn’t have the energy to give him even the weakest of smiles. Coffee has caffeine and caffeine keeps people awake; Jess wanted so desperately to fall asleep and never wake up.  
She curled in on herself a little more, pulling her arms tighter around her knees, and wincing as her movement agitated her wounds. She tried to ask when she could go to the hospital, but her voice had fled sometime in the night, leaving her question a hoarse cough. The coffee man seemed to understand what she’d meant, and replaced his hand on her shoulder to comfort her. Soon, he’d said, but that was what everyone had been saying since she got here. Jess was beginning to think it was a lie.

Jess woke up.  
She had been in the hospital when the authorities had broken the news to her that everyone else who had gone up the mountain had died. The officers’ official words for a few of her friends were “presumed dead” but Jess knew that if they’d gone through anything like she had, they wouldn’t be found alive. There had been still more questions for Jess about things they had found in the lodge, machines with saws and cameras and guns and more than a few dead pigs, but Jess couldn’t answer anything about what had happened there. The officers were also confused about how Jess had gotten into the mines in the first place, and Jess couldn’t blame them. She didn’t fully understand it herself, but she knew that whatever it was that had dragged her down under the earth was awful and evil and not human.  
It hurt to remember what had happened to her on the mountain, but it wasn’t as bad as the hospital’s therapist seemed to think it would be. Jess figured it was because she hadn’t been awake to experience it in the first place, so there really wasn’t anything that painful to remember. What really hurt was when she was alone in her room, stuck in her bed, with nothing to stop her from remembering her friends. She hadn’t even been that close with some of them, but knowing they were dead, gone, and never coming back was terrible to think about. All of their parents must be in awful places themselves, especially the Washingtons, losing all three children so suddenly and horribly. For their part, Jess’ parents were trying to be sympathetic. They’d come to visit her in the hospital, and it was the first time Jess had seen them in same room without any yelling or arguing in years.  
But the thing that stung the most, more than her physical scars, more than her friends being dead, was that Jess had survived. She was alone. Somehow, something had made her the only person to come down off that mountain alive, and in the dark nights, alone in her hospital room, she wasn’t sure she deserved it.

Jess woke up.  
The hospital had sent her home, with a prescription for many, many painkillers, and the reminder to please let them know if her condition got worse. She’d needed less medical care than she had expected, less than she would have liked, but there wasn’t really a way to ask them to do more to fix her when she couldn’t even say what was wrong.  
Now that she was home, and spent most of her days curled up in her bed, it was harder for her parents to keep up appearances, to pretend they were coping with how she was coping.  
Her other friends had given up on trying to contact her; they’d all stopped trying after a few missed calls and one-sided messages. The hospital therapist had recommended Jess continue seeing a therapist after her release, but it was a lot harder to keep up with when the doctor didn’t come to her.  
Jess rarely had the energy to do much of anything, and whenever she could muster up the oomph to do something, the smallest detail could remind her of her friends and send her spiraling back down.  
The movie she tried to watch was one that Chris had sworn up and down was the greatest feat of cinematography and acting ever filmed, but Sam claimed was unwatchable garbage.  
When she tried to read, the book reminded her of the one Ashley was reading when Matt had accidentally hit her in the face with a ball he’d been trying to throw to Josh.  
She’d tried to paint her nails once, but the first color she’d grabbed was one she had bought with Emily on a cathartic late night shopping spree after Mike had dumped her.  
Everything was like that, each activity she tried brought out the tiniest details that dredged up memories of her friends, her dead friends.  
So Jess spent most days alone in her room, trying to sleep and just...forget everything. To forget what happened to her friends that awful night, what had happened to her. Forgetting her friends had ever been at all, trying anything to feel alive again, to feel like just maybe she deserved to still be here when they weren’t.

Jess woke up.


End file.
